 Does your local community or project have a hard time keeping up with everything that is happening in the Wikimedia movement? In this talk, I'll explain why podcasts are an important way of disseminating information, explain how it's an underutilized resource in our communities right now, and how you can get started filling that information gap while having fun doing it. What is your name? My name is Jan Einle, and I'm a Swedish Wikipedia. I have been doing Wikipedia pod then for three years, almost 150 episodes and almost 90 episodes of Wikidata live editing. I'm an admin on Swedish Wikipedia. I edit on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and I was the Swedish Wikimedia of the year last year. So first, a general point that is applicable to every time that you are passing along information, true for podcasts as well as newsletters or anything else like that, and it is the part of the curation process. You act as a journalist, making sure that what you are passing along to your audience and to your listeners is relevant to them. Now, the strength of the podcast is the audio format. Some people will have it easier time digesting that type of information rather than just reading it. It is also great thanks to the ability to letting people multitask. This means that some people may have time to listen to this while doing something else, and they couldn't have that time reading up on everything, even if you were collecting it in a newsletter. By this, I mean that you can listen to a podcast while perhaps commuting to your work, while you're doing your chores in your household, while you're doing your workout, or perhaps even for some people while you're at work. And it's important to do it in your local language. First of all, I think that Tobler's first law of geography also applies to language, and it says everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. So with that, if someone is giving you information in your language, you probably have an easier time to be able to relate to that. And specifically in the Wikimedia projects, if you're talking about the language version, you may know the local policies, you know how the local community behaves, and you know what technology is enabled and what settings it has, which means that you can make it more customized for your listeners than if you were talking to the whole world. But also look at this practically. While many can understand many languages, listening to something that is not your mother tongue, it requires a higher cognitive load. So you have less resources in your brain to focus on the content, and you have to focus more on the form and what is being said. And we must also recognize that while many are proficient in reading a second language, if someone is talking quickly on a podcast, you might not be able to catch up with everything they say. And of course, we shall also be aware that not everyone has the privilege of knowing several languages. And that is why we make sure that we can reach more people by providing a podcast in more languages, specifically your podcast might not reach more, but in total if we are doing more podcasting in local languages. So how do you get started when podcasting? And you might feel intimidated by the technology behind it, but really you don't need a lot of technology. Often any kind of external microphone will be good enough. The one in your computer might pick up too much of other sounds to be good enough, but just if you have one external microphone in your webcam, that might be good. So you don't need a lot of tools. I really recommend when you're doing podcasts with some other person that you have headphones so that no sound will leak from the computer into the microphone. But the most important resource when you're doing podcasts is silence. The more quiet environment you can be, the better sound you will get because you can have more control of what you do. So try to find places that are silent and where there's no echo when you record. And if that means that you might have to record in another time of day, that might be what you have to do then. You can improve the sound quality if you're in a room by putting out some fabric around you, but echo is less of an issue than just other noise. So just try to find something where it's quiet because that will make it possible for you to record better. And then for your recording tools, I can highly recommend the Free and Open Source Software Audacity. It's available for several platforms. It has all the features that you should need to edit a podcast. I have been doing all my podcasts editing in that software. Now, if you want to do recording remotely, there's several options and some are more tricky than others. But the most important thing I would say is that you test your setup before you're doing something that's when it's really important when you have an interviewee that can only join for a short while. So test, test and test. Now to go for some more practical notes, the Wikipedia Weekly podcast has a StreamYard account. And if you would like to record through that, that is certainly possible. Just look for us on Metawiki for Wikipedia Weekly and take contact with us and we will set you up for recording. The benefit of recording with StreamYard, for example, is that it has a separate channel for each audiophile, which makes it much easier to have a good quality of the sound when you're editing. But there are plenty of other resources out there. You could record from Zoom, for example. There are services specifically for podcasting that I hear are very good. I haven't tried it. And for the highest quality, you would try to do something that is a double-ender, which means that the one you're talking to on the other side is recording their sound locally and then sending you the files after the interview. This means that you will get a very high quality because it's not relying on your internet connection. You can record locally, they can record locally and then you edit it together. The downsides with that is that the editing takes a little bit more time because you need to sync them up. And of course, it's a little bit more troublesome for the one you are recording with because they need to be able to know how to record audio locally. But if you're a couple of persons with Wikipedia who know each other and wants to do this, this might be the best way to achieve great audio. So now when you come to figuring out what should I podcast about, first I would say a couple of questions that you would like to figure out first. And that is format, what niche you want, and the length of your podcast. So when I say format, I'm thinking do you want to do like a new sweep style podcast which has segments for different things? Do you want to do interviews with just one person in every episode that you're talking to? Or do you want to do monologues or sort of essays but online? Do you want to do breaking news and just do that topic when you come up? When I say niches or rather I talk about what kind of content will you like. You could have a mix of something. You could have something that's very specifically targeting a local project. For example a language version of Wikipedia. You could do something that is even more specific for a Wiki project. You could talk about community or you could talk about the governance which could relate to many different projects. You could talk about technology if you're interested in that. You could talk about regional aspects, perhaps even spanning in multiple languages. And you can talk about research about Wikimedia. You could have the focus of any kind of minority group or content gap angle within the Wikis. Or you could just do fun stuff. And of course any mix of this is also possible. One other thing that you want to consider is how often do you want to make a podcast? It takes some time to research. It takes some time to record. And of course editing also takes some time depending on how detailed you want to do edit and how fussy you are about it. It should sound good. So you can try out if you want to do it once a week, every fortnight, once a month. But I would suggest finding some sort of regular pattern because that is what is common among podcasts and it might be easier for your listeners to know what's happening and to follow along. One of the tricky parts after you decided on this is to where do I find information about this. And this is sort of the journalistic part of creating the podcast. So there are a number of places that are good for this. One of the obvious ones that you should have a look at and perhaps have in your RSS feed is the Wikimedia diff. A lot of things comes up there, news from various sources. So that's a good starting point. Then it's also good to look at other people who are publishing and Wikipedia signpost on English Wikipedia is a good collection of different kinds of news coming up. I would also suggest that you join the Wikipedia weekly Facebook group because there's a lot of different things coming up in those. And then of course all different affiliates follow them on social media because not everyone is posting to Diff or on Facebook, but if you follow them on their social media, you'll be sure to reach the news. And you can specifically follow the ones that are more relevant to your target group. Then there's a number of different newsletter that you could subscribe to on Wiki and on Mail, but if you're interested in tech, there's the tech news. There's the Wikidata newsletter. The growth team from Wikimedia Foundation has a newsletter and so does the abstract Wikipedia. Wikipedia education comes with the newsletter and there's also this monthly Glam. So you get a collection of different things that you can search for and see if something is relevant. You might also consider joining the mailing list Wikimedia because that's one that spans over multiple projects. But if there's also a mailing list for your project, it should probably be on that one as well to catch things that come up. And of course there are a few other podcasts about Wikipedia and you can always be inspired by them. For all of these things, it might be nice to give credit or in your show notes show the original source so that people can find out where it came from. So for other podcasts that you could listen to, there is a podcast category on Wikimedia Commons that you should of course check out. There's a lot of back catalog that you can listen back to. There's the Wikipedia weekly. Of course that's history, but you can listen to a couple of these can give you some clue of what a Wikipedia podcast could be like. We also have the ongoing right now, the world according to Wikipedia, that you should really subscribe to and listen to. There's a podcast from the Movement Strategy, which is very specific in its content, but it can give you an idea of what you can talk about. There's the Wikim Africa only on YouTube, but I still think it's worth looking into in the realm of podcasts, even if it's more of a live stream, because it has the form of a podcast with guests coming on and there's a new segment so you can be inspired. There's also the Wiki Update podcast, which is shorter and you usually have a guest something with a little bit of an interview. And then not exactly Wikipedia, but I'll bring it up here. Between the brackets, which is about media Wiki, but usually, since Wikimedia is one of the big users of media Wiki, it's also something related to the Wikimedia movement. And those are things that you can be inspired by. But most of all, I hope that you have been inspired by this talk and want to try out podcasting yourself. Good luck!